White Nights
by IngloriousPrussian
Summary: My concept of Ivan Russia 's role in Russia withdraws, Ivan deserts, aren't I clever xD Several human characters used as well. M rating is for language. It was needed. Natalia is like that.
1. Chapter 1

The man at the desk wasn't pleased with me.

It was only fair, since I couldn't say as was pleased with him as of that moment. I had only been in the office for a little over five minutes, and perhaps I was being hasty. First impressions and all that. People say they don't matter, but I've found that they can be very hard to get rid of once they're there.

The man at the desk glared at me again, as if it's my own fault that he'd lost the next box of files he needed. A's in one box. B's in another. And now it was me that was holding up the line. I let my bag slip the few inches to the floor, rubbing my suitcase-strap indented palm against my leg.

The boy in line behind me – and there was no other way to describe him other than a boy, it was foolish how young they conscripted people – cleared his throat. I ignored him, still staring at the desk and waiting for the man there to find the box of B-letter name files. His mouth was constantly twitching, as if he had a small piece of food stuck in his teeth that he was in a constant attempt to remove.

"Ah,' he said at last. The box was removed from under another desk and set down next to the other folders there. There was a plain sheet, marking the days, the boxes carefully crossed off until the twelfth of June.  
"Name and patronymic?" the man at the desk asked.  
I blinked, certain that by this time he would have lost something else. In front of him was a hand-printed page with blank spaces across it. The man's mustached face twitches again.

"Ivan Ivanovitch,' I said.  
"Surname?"  
"Braginsky."  
"Right." The dry sound of the pen against the yellowed page.  
"Current age?" The man doesn't look up from the sheet.  
"Twenty-Eight."  
"Hometown?"  
"Orel."  
"First door on the left."

His tone of voice didn't change, and it was a second before I process what he's said and picked up my suitcase, by which time the boy behind me was clearing his throat again. He has nothing to complain about. We were all the late ones, the short, gap-filled line stretching from the desk halfway into the middle of the room.

I found the first door on the left. It was a low-ceilinged room with several rows of metal chairs set up toward the back. Scattered people had already filled up about a half dozen of the chairs, always with spaces of one or two chairs between each person. I took a chair in the front row, for no other reason than to avoid having to push through the other rows to a less noticeable position. It was warm, and the window was open.  
I took of the greatcoat that I had for some reason still been wearing, despite the weather, and laid it on the seat next to me, along with my bag. There were enough chairs, and the ones directly beside an occupied chair seemed to be unusable to the people in this room anyway. A few others from the line outside filed in, including the throat-clearing boy.

Nobody was looking at the other people, the noises from the street outside took up what would have otherwise been an uncomfortable silence. We knew why we were here. Don't make friends, we'd probably all been told. They'll be dead in a week anyway. Best not to think about it. Think about something else. The room was thick with the sound of people not thinking about the other occupants of the room being shot, bleeding, being left to die because the group couldn't afford to go back. The medics were all busy enough as it is. There's nothing more we can do for you, son. You fought your hardest. We'll tell your mother, your sweetheart. It's a good death, if there was such a thing.

By this point, most of the line from the front room had come in, I was sure. There weren't many of us late arrivals to begin with. I kept my gaze focused on my boots, thinking the same as all the others. Not blood. Not the trenches. Not wondering if maybe he wasn't dead after all, if maybe that moment was enough to go back and check, get him out of the line of fire, get him help. It's going to happen at some point. Always does.

The sound of our thinking was overwhelming.  
I stole a quick glance at the other figures in their own chairs and thoughts. Some were doing the same thing looking at the others and not trying to be noticed doing the looking. I didn't stand out as any more noticeable than the rest. No thinner, no poorer, perhaps a bit taller, though not by much.  
After a moment, I realized someone standing in front of the chair I had my coat and bag on, clearly wanting to sit down. His grey eyes glared at me, then at my things, then me.

There was room in the row just behind me. Just walk two meters. It's not hard.  
The man sneered slightly, glancing at the people in the surrounding chairs as if thinking perhaps one of them would speak up and tell me I'm being stupid. All of us were silent. Even me and the sneering man.  
Do you want to make a fuss out of this?  
He didn't.

The door opened, and a uniformed officer walked in. He was short, though when he spoke, it was like his voice was trying to make up for the fact. It spread to every corner of the room, assaulting us after our long wait in silence.  
"Not only are you the conscripted, not the volunteers, but you are the very latest of the conscripted. Not an eager group to be fighting, yes?"  
Silence.

The man continued almost at once.  
"Fighters or not fighters, it is not my job to chastise you for your actions or to call you cowards. You'll get enough of it from your fellow soldiers as it is."  
Cowards again, is it? You were thinking it, surely. Cowards for putting your own country first? Serbia is not Russia. Let Serbia fend for itself.  
The officer went on, but my mind had started to wander, back to where it had ended up all too often since I had gotten the letter.  
We're fighting for _this?_

__The throat-clearing boy from the other room raised one hand. The officer ignored him for a few seconds, allowing him to look more and more like a ridiculous schoolboy. Finally, he nodded in his direction.  
"I'm sorry to interrupt, comrade officer ah – "  
"Arakidy."

"Officer Arakidy, but I was under the impression that those who did not wish to fight at the front would be sent to the workhouse in Petrograd to help make the rifles."  
Not fight at the front. His choice of words only made it worse. As if manufacturing guns all day in a warehouse was anything like fighting. Needed, perhaps. Not fighting.  
"You are right."  
There was no elaboration.  
"Sir – "  
"You want to make guns, is that it?"  
"I – ah, yes, officer."

"I would have preferred you had said this sooner. You were conscripted for a reason. All who wish to pick up a gun and fight and be spared from the further torment of the rest of the men, go with officer Radchenko."  
There was an odd moment in which the entire room began looking around at the other seated men wondering where this supposed officer Radchenko was, whether this was some sort of bad joke, or whether we really would be given the choice to prepare ammunition instead of be sent to the front line.  
I didn't move.

Men on both sides of me stood, glanced at Arakidy, sat halfway down, then got up again. After a few seconds, the door opened, and another man in uniform entered, which we all supposed was Radchenko. Arakidy motioned for the boys standing to go with him. More than half the room went, including the throat-clearing boy who would now be remembered by me as the boy with no resolve. You asked the question and now you don't even go through with it? Arakidy was playing with us, it's clear as anything. Anyone conscripted got the choice to fight or go to the workhouses, surely he knew as much.  
The door shut, and Arakidy started pacing in front of us, his voice a little quieter than it had been previously.

'You heard me. There's a train to the other side of Petrograd that leave tonight. There's nothing I could tell you that they won't tell you once you've arrived, other than that you'd better get used to working."  
As if we weren't already.  
Nobody laughed.  
Contrary to his words, Arakidy kept talking, describing where the train would arrive, what we were to do until then, what we should expect from the bosses at the workhouse. I stopped listening to him. He might have been fooling himself, but he wasn't fooling me, and I doubted he was fooling many of the other people left in the room. We were the smart ones, or at least, we had the potential to be smart, rather than agreeing to fight a war that was doomed from the start and even more doomed three years along. Petrograd was falling apart, not unlike the rest of the country, and now we were expected to fall apart along with it by agreeing to fight a nation of German bastards we had no business fighting anyway.  
Again, it came back to that same thing.

The same word.  
Unnecessary.

It had been bothering me constantly for years, and when I'd try to ignore it, it came back. All of this was unnecessary; the war, the politics, the lot of it. I don't know when exactly the thought finally came to me in this degree, but I think maybe it had been there all along.  
I wasn't going.

Not to the eastern front, not to the workhouses. I wasn't a coward, and I would have liked to see some of the men who went with officer Radchenko who thought of themselves as heroes do what I was going to do. It takes a whole different sort of courage not to fight when everyone else is. Fighting with a gun – that anyone can do. Shoot, reload, duck, shoot again. Fall at the right time for your country. Try to fight the minds of hundreds of men who will think they know the reason you're not fighting. When they really have no idea.

I wasn't fighting because it was unnecessary.  
For every one of me, there was bound to be ten others who also find this war unneeded, and lack the willpower not to fight. For all I knew, that was the boy who had asked the question to Arakidy, and done the exact opposite of what he had claimed. There were more of him, I was nearly positive.  
And then there was me.  
I wasn't going.

I waited until Arakidy finished talking, at which point he looked at the assembled men as if he had just said something deeply profound and was waiting for a reply. I had no idea what he had said.  
"Excuse me, officer, would you mind terribly if I stepped outside for a moment to have a cigarette?" I asked, already standing and picking up my coat.  
"Very well." Arakidy's words translated more or less to _be quick about it._  
Before he could ask me why I was taking my bag with me, I walked out the door. Once out of the room, I passed the man at the front desk without any questions. If you looked enough like you were supposed to be there, nobody asked questions. The gates of the station were open, unlocked. The temperature of the air had gone down, and from the clock outside, it was nearing seven in the evening.  
The guard I pass nodded at me. Perhaps he thought I was being sent home, that I didn't fit the physical standards, perhaps I had some sort of illness, despite the fact that it had clearly been stated that examinations weren't to be held until nine, an hour before the train would come.

I started walking faster. I figured I had about three minutes, maybe less, before Arakidy realized I hadn't come back and sent someone to find out what the devil I was thought I was doing. At the railroad tracks, I took a turn, heading toward one of the Neva bridges that would take me further away from the center of Petrograd.

It was nearly an hour of walking later when it occurred to me that I was going south. It wasn't something I had been thinking about, and I had no conscious thought of where I was going, except the moment I took a right at one of the Neva bridges, I supposed I was going to Moscow.


	2. Chapter 2

The sun wouldn't set again until the beginning of July. It was at the moment low on the horizon, managing to resist the pull the horizon had over it, and was nearly ready to begin another daily climb back up the sky. I wasn't tired, I don't think anyone was at this time of year. The sun didn't sleep, and so you slept whenever you felt like it, be it what the rest of the world called day or night. Day and night meant nothing now.  
I kept following the railroad south out of Petrograd, until the city was small in the distance, and if the men from the army station thought it worth their while to follow me at all, they were doing a poor job of it. I hadn't passed anyone for miles, and wheat fields stretched out on either side of the tracks, all the way toward the red, stagnant sun.

At a crossroads, I thought about taking a turn. I wasn't likely to meet anyone if I kept walking along the tracks, and I had no food with me, only a small amount of money in the pocket of my coat. After a brief hesitation, I took the turn, and luckily, true to my hopes, passed a cart horse and farmer, with whom I was able to buy a small amount of bread and sausage.  
I lost track of what time it was.  
Not that it mattered much.

The side road took me into a shabby collection of peasant houses, and I decided to turn around and risk following the tracks for another dozen miles or so, hoping there would be another turn before long.  
The fields were met abruptly with a scattering of tree-covered hills, and after eating, I threw my coat down on the ground and thought about possibly sleeping.

It didn't take long; I had been walking longer than I realized.  
When I opened my eyes again, the sun had progressed visibly up the horizon, and it took me only a moment to notice that I wasn't alone. I sat up at once, and the dog startled and bounded back a pace, only to slink back up toward me and resume sniffing at the pocket of my coat that had previously held the bread and sausage. The dog was light grey, and so tall that in my sitting position, I was looking it directly in the face. Its long muzzle sniffled at my pocket again, and I pushed it away.  
"Go on," I told the dog.

The dog stared at me. Small bits of leaves and the like were tangled in his long, wiry hair, and I reached up and pulled a stray pine needle from the fur on his ear. It was a bad idea. The dog only moved his head closer to me, expecting to be petted and groomed further.

"Go!" I pointed back in the direction of the most recent town I had passed. The dog startled, but didn't move. "I don't want a dog!"  
The dog ignored me again, panting slightly.  
I made a motion as if I were throwing something with my arm, and while the dog was tearing off in the direction of the invisible stick, I quickly gathered my bag and coat and started briskly walking in the other direction.  
It was a bad idea. The dog returned with a stick of his own and dropped it at my feet. I kept walking, the dog loping after me still carrying the stick.

"I'm not going to throw it," I said. "You may as well go home, boy. You hear that? Go home, boy!"  
I made my way back to the railroad tracks, figuring my best plan at this moment was to ignore the dog and wait for it to tire of me. By the time the tracks had crossed a small side branch of the Neva, and passed into a stand of trees, the dog was still there. I hoped if it had a master I wasn't getting it lost. The dog had a rough, rope collar; at some point someone had owned it, though whether they'd want it back, I didn't know. We were rather far from the nearest town at this point, and in a few minutes, the hill where I found the dog would be lost from view.  
The dog found a new stick, the previous one had since been chewed to pieces.  
"I'm not throwing that one, either," I said. The dog made a whining sound around the stick in its mouth, and I resolved not to talk to it anymore.

The sound of running footsteps made me glance back over my shoulder just as a young man emerged from the trees wearing a faded grey undershirt and pants that had been patched at the knees, but were staring to come undone again at the edges of the patches. He stood a few paces away from where the dog and I had also stopped.  
"Good morning, comrade. You must excuse my dog; he takes to strangers quite easily."

The man grinned, and I found myself still watching his face a few moments after he had ceased talking. He had an incredible ability to speak in a normal, clear voice, while hardly moving his mouth. At the sight of his master, the dog padded forward a few paces and sat at the man's feet, thumping his tail against the ground.  
"This is your dog?" I repeated, stupidly.  
"Yes, she's mine. She got away from me this morning, but the pair of you seem to have gotten along all right." He glanced again at the dog, who had lain down with his head on his front feet and was chewing the stick through the middle.  
"He's not bad, for a dog."  
"She."  
"Sorry," I nodded.

"It's no matter." He held out a hand. "Vasily Petrovitch. And you've already met Chaika."  
"Ivan Ivanovitch. Do you live far from here? It would be a pity if I led your dog astray by accident," I said.  
Vasily shook his head. The dog, Chaika, barked and stood up, and Vasily laid a hand on her head. "Home has little to do with it, I'm not about to stay in Petrograd any longer, not with things the way they are. I'm going to find work somewhere else."  
Vasily started walking in the direction of the railroad line, the same way I had been traveling.  
"You too?" I asked.

"Who isn't? Get work while you can, while there still is work."  
There was a moment's pause. Vasily glanced over his shoulder, though the only things there were the wood and the railroad track in the opposite direction. "The only things on this side of Petrograd are the train stop and the military station." It wasn't a question, but his tone of voice made it clear he was after some sort of reply.  
"That's true," I sad.  
"You wouldn't get on a train to Petrograd just to come right back around and walk the other direction."  
"You're an observant one, aren't you?"

"Oh, enough of this, yes? I'm not going to do something stupid like turn you in."  
Chaika ran a few meters ahead and returned with a scrap of cloth that was lying next to the tracks. It was old, threadbare, with rust staining both sides. Chaika nosed Vasily's hand, and when he refused to take the cloth, she began chewing it.  
"You think I'm a deserter," I said.  
"Unless you tell me otherwise."

"I didn't formerly start work for the army, so whether makes me a deserter or not is anyone's judgment."  
Vasily laughed. "Good for you, Vanyavitch. I didn't even show up when I was called, I just made arrangements with some friends of my family who also wanted to find work in another city, and left I'm going to be meeting them at the next station. Should only be a few kilometers now."  
The question hung in my mind, always accompanied by the wrong words. It sat there for about a kilometer, during which both Vasily and myself were silent. As it went, I was spared the trouble of voicing it when Vasily asked me the same question I was going to ask him.  
"You left, deserter or not. Why is that?" His voice wasn't unfriendly.  
"The war is unnecessary."

Another pause.  
"You thinks so?" Vasily asked. "You could put it that way."

"We're killing our own men and killing Russia at the same time. We don't need to be fighting, and this war couldn't have been at a worse time when you think of the politics of the whole matter. You don't need to hear it from me, however you seem like an intelligent man."  
"Getting out of the war wouldn't solve things," Vasily said.  
"Not all of them, you're right. We have problems, and the war is the one thing we don't need. Let the rest of Europe take care of itself."  
"You're very adamant about that."  
Once again, you're very observant.

"The new government will take us out of the war," I said.  
"You think so?"  
"Don't you?"  
"I hadn't thought about it much. The royals aren't going to last much longer, but that seems like an awfully large piece of optimism," he said.  
"They'll do it."  
"I hope you're right."  
"So what about you?" I asked. "You left before they could find you, clearly you don't think fighting the war is a good idea."  
"I don't. I also don't want to die before my twenty-seventh birthday. I don't think this mess with the Serbs and the Germans is a good enough reason for me to want to end my life. Perhaps that's arrogant of me, but if that's the case, so be it."  
"You're not."

"Sometimes I wonder if I'm being stupid. I've not talked with anyone else for a few days, it's been only me and Chaika, and I'll start thinking perhaps I'm selfish. The others, they go. They don't complain. A lot of them even come back."  
"A lot don't."

Vasily sighed. "I know that. Look, there's the station."  
I glanced up. In the distance a wooden shelter stood at the crossing point of two different track lines, though we were still too far off to tell if the people Vasily was expecting were there or not. He kept talking to me, worrying himself about the war. He had points, though I didn't tell him I thought him foolish for even thinking about it for so long.  
As we neared the station, Chaika ran on ahead of us and came back with a woman about my age. The dog kept running back and forth between the woman and the two of us, until we had finally caught up to her.  
"Where's Adrian?" Vasily asked the woman.  
She glanced up from where she was kneeling down to rub Chaika under the collar. "Didn't I tell you already? He's staying with my mother. He's only fourteen for god's sake, he doesn't want to move so far away, and besides, there's still work with my parents for him. Who's this son of a Cossack bastard you have with you?" Her voice didn't change, and instead of looking at Vasily or me, she seemed to be addressing Chaika.  
"His name's Ivan," Vasily said.  
"His name's Ivan – so what, I don't care what his name is, where'd you pick him up from? He your boyfriend?"  
"Chaika found him. We were heading the same direction."  
"Did you, Chaika? Why'd you go and do a thing like that?" The woman glanced up for the first time and glared at me. Chaika drooled.  
"It was him who followed me," I said, somehow compelled to reply to a question that had been asked to a dog.  
"Her."  
"Right."  
"You want me to start calling you a woman all of a sudden? She can understand you when you're talking about her."  
I had my doubts, but I kept quiet about the dog from that point on, to avoid accidentally calling it a boy again and therefore being referred to as a woman.  
Vasily started walking again, Chaika following, and the woman stood and followed, though glanced back over her shoulder a moment later.

"I thought you said you were looking for work near Moscow." It wasn't a question.  
"I am," I said, catching up.  
"You from Petrograd?"  
"No."

"Nastasia, can you leave it?" Vasily said.  
She shrugged and picked up a stick to throw to Chaika. "It doesn't matter to me where he's from. I was just wondering why he ended up in Petrograd."  
"I was conscripted," I said.

Nastasia looked at me again, appearing for the moment more startled than hostile. Then her former frown returned.  
"What – they didn't want you?"  
"The opposite, actually."

"Hah! The Cossack son of a bitch thinks he's too good for the army."  
Chaika ran loops around our legs, narrowly avoiding tripping me in the process.  
"I never said that."

"Look," Vasily puts in, "You never gave me any of this rubbish when you found out I wasn't going, and I don't see why you have to do it to him. He has reasons, just the same as the rest of us."  
"Does he? Have you been talking his head off about the war and the army the same as you have every opportunity you get with me? It's getting damn old by now, so I suppose it's all the better that you have a fresh person to whine to about it."  
"I don't whine," said Vasily.

"Call it what you want, but whatever it is you don't shut up. So you didn't go, can't you just move on?"  
I stopped listening to the pair of them. The track we were following ran straight out toward the horizon, and by now we had taken enough turns so that the sun was to our backs, and our shadows pulled out in front of us, warped and spindly on the dead grass. We hadn't passed another side-track or path since we met Nastasia at the station, and I was starting to feel quite hungry again.

The sun performed its nightly dip toward the horizon, only to be hoisted back up again a few hours later, pulling our shadows back towards our legs. We stopped near a stream and a stand of fir trees for a few hours, though I didn't sleep much. I wasn't tired. I kept on thinking about what I was going to do once I got to Moscow, what the likelihood was someone would catch on to the fact that I wasn't where I was supposed to be. I figured it wasn't high, nobody cared about names if you did your work like you were supposed to, and the war was as good as finished anyway. Give it a few months, and I had a strong feeling the new government would withdraw the Russian troops from the eastern front. It was only a matter of time, and when that happened, the work would continue on as it should; work that wasn't _unnecessary._  
"Aren't you coming?"

I looked up. Nastasia was standing over me, glaring again.  
"Am I?"

"I asked you, Cossack, how would I know what you were doing? I thought you were coming with us, that's all."  
I got to my feet and threw my coat over one shoulder. The sun was low in the sky; evening, though it was as good a time to get going again as any. I hoped we found a crossroads in the train tracks soon, otherwise we might have to make a guess as to which way would be the most convenient rout South. For some reason I was under the impression that Vasily and Nastasia knew where they were going, though I couldn't think why that could have been.  
There was a long silence.

"A Muscovite, a Ukrainian, and a Finn are stopped by the Industrial Workers Party as they're coming home from work," Nastasia starts with no warning. "The Party leader says to the Finn – "  
"Can you stop?" Vasily asks.  
"Why?"

"You're making that joke up as you go."  
"They're the best kind."  
"Fine, then, how does the rest go?"  
"Dammit, you've made me forget it." She snorts and turns back toward where Chaika had been sniffing a rabbit hole a few meters back. "Chaika! Here, girl!"  
Chaika comes bounding over.  
"Well all right, if you don't want to hear the joke then I'm at least going to talk to your bastard of a boyfriend, then."

Both Vasily and I open our mouths at the same time, but Nastasia just laughs. "Save it, you two are ridiculous. Ivan, you said had reasons for leaving. Let's hear them. They're bound to be different from Vasily's, and god knows I've heard his often enough."  
"Haven't I already said?"

"Not out loud. Not while I was here, and I told you, I'm curious now."  
"I don't think this war is a good idea."  
"Hah! Sure you don't."  
"Do you?"  
"Don't really know. I don't spend my life obsessing over it like some people do. Sure, nobody wants to get shot at, but that doesn't mean sometimes it's not needed. I don't know if this is one of those times or not. I'm inclined to think not, otherwise I wouldn't go out of my way to stay in the company of deserters like the two of you. There are definitely better things the tsars can do besides fighting a war over something like the Serbs."  
"The tsars aren't going to last," I said.  
"Sure they're not. Who told you that? You're brilliant."  
"The war will end once they're gone."  
"It might end sooner than that, with the way our men are being killed on the front."  
"What is it you're saying?" Vasily cut in.  
"I'm saying, even if it takes the Workers Party another five years to get their asses together, the tsars might be forced to withdraw from the war because there's just won't be any of us left," Nastasia replied. "Have you talked to someone on the front recently? My older brother came back sick because they couldn't use him anymore, said about twice as many men were getting killed as they were letting people know. Maybe there was a good reason at one point, but wars shouldn't last like this, we're wearing ourselves out."  
"The sooner the better," I said. "I meant, that we withdraw, that is."  
"Of course you did," Nastasia snorted.

"If we're pulled out now, whoever pulls us out will look all the better for it," Vasily said. "It's hard to lose a war that you quit from. Even with this many dead."  
"Is that what you're worried about?" I asked.  
"Somewhat. The longer we're sending men off to their deaths, the more we'd be in a position for further problems."  
"Don't worry about it," I said.

"Why, now?"  
"Soviets never lose."

* * *

**A few random notes: **To any who many be wondering, Chaika is a wolfhound.

Chaika means 'seagull' in Russian (with my rough transliteration ;p)


End file.
